Digital Lurking

I’ll admit it. I’m a bit of a music taste voyeur. On the tube. On the bus. Standing in the queue.

One day in London, trapped underground in a metal tube hurtling as slow as possible to somewhere I didn’t want to go, I decided to pass the time looking at a phone, just like everyone else. But I wasn’t looking at my phone, I was looking at someone else’s phone right in front of me while they looked at it. He was listening to Celine Dion.

He didn’t look like he had mental issues or drank the blood of babies at night or anything. He looked like a normal guy, albeit with a deep, dark secret lurking and glowing there in his palm.

Once upon a time we displayed what we consumed for entertainment. We carefully displayed the books we may or may not have read on shelves. We had CDs on display in piles in front of the stereo or languishing on top of the TV stacked in jangled, careening columns. Its all crammed now on phones and computers and into the aether of the Internet flowing into our lives and into our heads. Technology, like all cultural and status signals in our lives, used to be very obvious, shining there in the driveway or dominating the corner of the living room. Its now all disappeared.

I would have known a lot more about this guy if he was my cousin’s friend who we just had to stop over to for a second to pick something up, but this wasn’t the case. There was no signals that we have adapted to over thousands of years to understand what other people understand as culture and what is acceptable and what is not which this guy clearly didn’t.